Still, beggars can’t be choosers. The four of them were outside the cheapest hotel Lucas had ever seen, a converted Georgian on the wrong side of the Euston Road. Their targets had been tracked here, and Lucas had no idea how that worked. Something to do with Rove’s App. He knew, now, that the boss was coordinating things from over there, using bizarre technology to detect anomalies: people and things that had been touched by that other world. Or other worlds. He wasn’t convinced the cold forest and the dinosaurs existed alongside Rove’s cramped submarine.

He was resolutely not thinking through the implications of anything he’d seen.

There was a claustrophobic enclosed yard at the building’s rear, opening onto a narrow alley. Lucas sent Amin that way and left Terrence on the street in case anybody tried bolting from a window. That left him and big Josef to go in the front. He showed his fake ID to the old woman at reception as Josef went up the stairs with his phone, letting the App guide him. Lucas had to stay back for that to work, given he’d set the goddamn thing off himself now. He was touched by the otherworld, like he was radioactive. Cheery thought.

“Got a reading.” Josef’s voice was low, Slavic intonations bleeding through.

“Coming.” Lucas nodded at the receptionist and then went up the stairs as quietly as he could, telling Amin and Terrence to be ready. When he hit the second floor he gave Josef the thumbs-up and pulled out his gun.

One kick from the big man almost took the door out of the frame entirely. The room beyond could not have hidden anyone, but Josef upended the bed and ripped down the shower curtain anyway.

There was a litter of cigarette butts on the windowsill. Lucas brushed his right hand, the hand that could still feel properly, over the ash, sensing a residual warmth.

Moments later he was outside with the others, phones hunting out any trace of disruption. If his quarry had left a trail of otherworldliness, then they were goddamn going to find it.

“Mr. Rove,” he reported. “They’re gone.”

Rove was silent for a few heartbeats, and Lucas waited. Was he sufficiently disappointed to delete Lucas from the company records as well? At last, though, the man’s voice came to him, across who knew what kind of intervening space.

“My associates believe they can locate them, but this is not an exact science. Look at your phone.”

Lucas pulled the device from his ear. A map of London’s surrounding streets had sprung up, featuring a…cloud of red dots. It was as though a plague of blood-filled mosquitos was descending on Clerkenwell. There were denser patches and thinner ones, swirling about a nebulous centre.